A body of standards, including a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries.
Sponsored by Biodiversity Information Standards (TWDG), the current standard was last modified in October 2009.
An early metadata initiative from the Earth sciences community, intended for the description of scientific data sets. It inlcudes elements focusing on instruments that capture data, temporal and spatial characteristics of the data, and projects with which the dataset is associated. It is defined as a W3C XML Schema.
Sponsored by the Global Change Master Directory, the DIF Writer's Guide Version 6 is from November 2010.
Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification particularly developed for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and associated efforts (Michener et al., 1997, Ecological Applications).
Sponsored by ecoinformatics.org, EML Version 2.2.0 was released in 2019.
Some repositories have decided that current standards do not fit their metadata needs, and so have created their own requirements.
A metadata standard for describing environmental monitoring activities, programmes, networks and facilities published by the UK Environmental Observation Framework (UKEOF).
The European Directory of Marine Environmental Datasets metadata scheme, which is a profile of ISO 19115.
Established by a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF is a web portal promoting and facilitating the mobilization, access, discovery and use of biodiversity data. The portal uses a profile of EML; a How-to Guide and Reference Guide for using the profile are available.
A web application that offers data publishers wishing to serve to the GBIF network an easy interface for describing data elements as basic text files, composing an appropriate XML Darwin Core descriptor file to accompany them.
A tool to validate XML metadata against the Darwin Core Text Guidelines.
A software platform using Darwin Core and EML to facilitate the efficient publishing of biodiversity data on the Internet, using the GBIF network.
Metacat is a repository for data and metadata that helps scientists find, understand, and effectively use the data sets they manage or that have been created by others.
An application for accessing and manipulating metadata and data (both locally and on the network), with wizards creating metadata files using a subset of Ecological Metadata Language (EML).
The UKEOF Catalogue contains over 2000 metadata records of environmental observations undertaken and funded by public and third sector organisations.
The Catalogue provides a unique management tool to underpin the activities and requirements of the environmental observation community. It provides a strong basis for strategic planning, giving a holistic overview of environmental observations as well as a place to discover who is doing what, where, why and when.
An aggregation of information on all the known species in Australia, collected from museums, herbaria, community groups, government departments, individuals and universities. All data is converted to Darwin Core.
The Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) is a Natural Environment Research Council Data Centre hosted by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH). It manages nationally-important datasets concerned with the terrestrial and freshwater sciences.
Established by a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF is a web portal promoting and facilitating the mobilization, access, discovery and use of biodiversity data. The preferred format for publishing data to the GBIF network is the Darwin Core Archive, and its Integrated Publishing Toolkit uses EML as its data standard.
The GCMD uses DIF metadata to promote the discovery, access, and use of Earth science data and data-related services worldwide, parcitularly focusing on NASA data.
A network of federated institutions that have agreed to share data and metadata using a common framework, principally revolving around the use of the Ecological Metadata Language as a common language for describing ecological data.
A network providing the scientific expertise, research platforms, and long-term datasets necessary to document and analyze environmental change, it uses the Ecological Metadata Language in describing its data.
An EML developer, this US-based centre of cross-disciplinary research uses existing data to address major fundamental issues in ecology and allied fields.
A web portal using Darwin Core to describe biodiversity data collected in Madagascar.
Four distributed database networks (MaNIS, HerpNET, ORNIS and FishNet) using a Darwin Core engine to make bioinformatics specimen data interoperable, mappable and publicly available.